Vietnam vet who inspired movie dies

Basil Plumley, a renowned career soldier whose exploits as an infantryman were portrayed in a book and a movie, has died aged 92 - an age his friends are amazed that he lived to see.

Plumley fought in World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam and was awarded a medal for making five parachute jumps into combat. The retired command sergeant major died Wednesday.

Friends said Plumley never told war stories and was known to hang up on people who called to interview him.

He was legendary in the army and gained widespread fame through a 1992 Vietnam War book that was the basis for the 2002 movie We Were Soldiers starring Mel Gibson. Actor Sam Elliott played Plumley in the film.

Debbie Kimble, Plumley's daughter, said her father died from cancer. Although the illness seemed to strike suddenly, Kimble said Plumley's health had been declining since his wife of 63 years, Deurice, died last May.

Plumley enlisted in 1942 and ended up serving 32 years. In World War II, he fought in the Allied invasion of Italy at Salerno and the D-Day invasion at Normandy. He later fought with the 187th Airborne Infantry Regiment in Korea. In Vietnam, Plumley served as sergeant major - the highest enlisted rank - in the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment.

"That puts him in the rarest of clubs," said journalist Joseph Galloway, who met Plumley while covering the Vietnam War for United Press International and remained lifelong friends with him. "To be combat infantry in those three wars, in the battles he participated in, and to have survived - that is miraculous."

It was during Vietnam in November 1965 that Plumley served in the Battle of la Drang, the first major engagement between the US Army and North Vietnamese forces. That battle was the basis for the book We Were Soldiers Once ... And Young, written nearly three decades later by Galloway and retired General Hal Moore, who had been Plumley's battalion commander in Vietnam.

In the 2002 film version, Gibson played Moore.

Galloway said several of Elliott's gruff one-liners in the movie were things Plumley actually said, such as the scene in which a soldier tells the sergeant major good morning and is told: "Who made you the (expletive) weather man?"

"Sam Elliott underplayed him. He was actually tougher than that," Galloway said. "He was gruff, monosyllabic, an absolute terror when it came to enforcing standards of training."

That's not to say he was mean or inhuman, Galloway said. "This was a man above all else who had a very big, warm heart that he concealed very well."